Jorge Arango

The design industry is an ecosystem. External design teams provide critical functions beyond augmenting internal design resources. Thought leadership — pushing the field’s boundaries — is indeed one of them.

Many practices and tools we take for granted — journey maps, personas, conceptual frameworks — were pioneered and/or popularized by ‘outies.’ Most of the field’s foundational books and blogs are by people outside ‘client’ organizations.

This isn’t because internal designers aren’t as clever or dedicated as their external colleagues. (Many ‘innies’ are former ‘outies.’) It’s because internal design roles are structurally misaligned with public thought leadership.

My sense is that Slack’s teams think of themselves as adding ‘features’ to a ‘product,’ instead of as stewards of a place where people work.